Going to need new lawyers, wonder who Grahame will call now.
The fun part is that the GOP Senators were all hanging their hats on the “It’s unconstitutional” defense for the upcoming Senate Trial. And this did have some logic behind it, and gave them a fig leaf to hide behind for their inevitable “Not Guilty” votes.
It seems that this was the logical, reasonable strategy that Trump’s 5 lawyers were following, probably working closely with GOP Senate leaders.
So of course, Trump being a complete and utter moron, was having none of that. He wants his defense to center around “I won the election because there was massive fraud.” (AKA a bunch of bullshit lies).
What he wants to do is insist he won, and he’s president right now, so therefore it could not have been an insurrection when he ordered his followers to march on Congress and disrupt the electoral process that was underway there. He’s essentially wanting to admit to everything, but that’s OK because he really won the election. An absolutely insane thing to do.
Now the GOP Senators will have to go on record with a “Not Guilty” vote, affirming that Trump really won the election, therefore the insurrection does not really count.
The only way this gets better is if Rudy G and Sidney Powell show up to make the case for Trump, complete with insane gibbering on live TV.
I’ll bet money there’s a version of this in his imagination that winds up with him getting to be president again.
I would not be at all surprised if he thinks that this is the certain outcome of the Senate trial.
“We find Donald J. Trump to be president! All in favor? Unanimous!”
As he smirks and raises his fist in victory to one of those slow claps that gets faster and louder over time.
I almost threw up a little in my mouth.
I know, it’s just so classically Trump. He’s a lawyer’s worst nightmare of a client.
As I posted in another thread, I keep coming back to his first impeachment and how incredibly easy it would’ve been to defuse that entire scandal, long before the actual impeachment, with a simple 2-3 minute apology speech. It wouldn’t even gave mattered once if it was obviously insincere, as long as he didn’t tweet anything that contradicted it.
But that just would’ve been too easy for everyone but Trump. Why make life any easier for your Republican colleagues…they’re all hostages, anyway.
Oh, please please please, let him try to defend himself. And if I may be bold enough to ask for more, will you please let him defend himself by making the same election fraud speech that he made at the rally? Please God, I’ve been really good and I don’t ask you for much…
So it seems Trump really believes that the election was stolen at this point.
I point this out, because in a number of threads we have debated what Trump himself believes. My personal opinion was that he neither believed the election was stolen nor was fair: to him, it’s all just words; only ratings and cheering crowds counts for anything.
But, if he’s insisting on his legal team using this defense (despite it failing in the courts 65 times), then he must believe it has merit on some level, and it seems I was wrong.
And let me be clear: this was clearly the cleanest election we’ve had in decades, as it’s had the deepest, most motivated “stress test” of any election, and found fuck all.
So Trump made up claims of fraud, then at some point as people in his circle repeated these claims, and his rubes believed it, he started to believe it too.
Because he incited a mob that nearly killed a bunch of them? Because, when he watched on TV as they broke into the Capitol, he didn’t summon anyone to their defense, but just sat back and enjoyed his must-see TV? Because one policeman was killed, two more have committed suicide, another will lose an eye, another was stabbed with a flagpole, and dozens of others were injured?
Nah, the Dems should let bygones be bygones, right? Look forward, not back?
Fuck that shit. Consequences this time are the best bet to keep there from being a next time. Impeaachment, conviction, exclusion from any future “Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States,” then the Federal and state prosecutors can have at him as well.
Given the death grip he currently has on the party, I couldn’t rule out that he would win the Republican nomination in 2024. Those numbers imply as a Republican he could get 40%, not even taking into account the 20% undecided. There would be a very possible chance for him to win.
Too many politically impossible things have happened in the past five years for me to want to leave any chance, however remote, for Trump to ever be able to run for president again.
I have to say, that’s a very fir point. In today’s climate, trying to predict elections four years (or four days) into the future appears to be a fool’s errnd.
I don’t think this is Trump being a moron. He sees the Republican strategy for exactly what it is – an attempt to vote to acquit based on a technicality, while distancing themselves from him and not having to defend his behavior. Trump knows perfectly well that Republican leaders are doing everything they can to put him in the rearview mirror as quickly as possible. That’s why he wants them to vote for his acquittal on the basis that he really did win the election and that he’s the rightful President of the United States. He wants to force them to keep showing fealty to him, or face the wrath of his supporters.
There won’t be any consequences.
It doesn’t matter that his lawyers left, and it won’t matter no matter what his “argument “ is in his defense. The way the Republicans are now, there will NEVER be enough in the Senate to convict, no matter, again, what Trump says or does. Trump knows this. That’s why he wants the election fraud BS to be front and center.
The Dems should forgo the trial and do the censure. That would remove the constitutional fig leaf from the picture and force the pubs to pass judgement on what Trump did. It’s a pale substitute for what should happen, but it’s the only way to get the pubs to reckon with what happened.
I think you’re both partly right.
Trump is not stupid about the Republicans’ preferred political strategy. He knows it’s a dodge around the core question, and an attempt to evade taking a stand on his personal concerns. He’s not harping on this just because he’s an idiot with a broken record for a brain, he’s harping on it because it compels GOP politicians to clearly choose sides, to unambiguously declare either support for Trump or opposition.
But he is, indeed, very stupid about what this actually means. In the long term, he doesn’t care that his hunger for absolute capitulation will lead to a GOP composed entirely of a base of zealous supporters with no tolerance for dissent, and that this will split the party and result in its national power being diminished. Yes, the distortions of the American political system will ameliorate this effect, but how far can they trust gerrymandering, suppression, and the Electoral College to protect them when the national vote margin climbs into double-digit millions?
And in the short term, he hasn’t considered any possibility that his demand for GOP Senators to kiss his ring and beg his favor by signing off on his delusional reality and criminal behavior in toto (which doubtless includes, as I said before, the laughable fantasy that he gets re-installed as President) might not go the way he wants or expects.
It’s true, the Republicans in the Senate are heavily predisposed to acquit. And if they get their quick show trial, with a rundown of the accusations and then a rush to a Nay vote covered by the principle of Constitutionality, they’ll absolutely follow that path, and pay no political price. But if Trump forces a circus, if the Dem trial managers are allowed to spend days or weeks laying out the connections and planning that led to the insurrection on 6-January, if conspirators in the rebellion provide witness to the scheme in exchange for plea deals, if hours and hours of television are spent unequivocally establishing Trump’s anti-American attempt to break democracy and the GOP keeps bleeding registrations as they have — and the Trump team responds to and argues with that, instead of dully repeating the mantra that none of this is relevant, only the Constitutional principle matters — then the political tipping point for Republican Senators could begin to shift.
That’s what makes Trump, ultimately, a moron: He understands the GOP’s plan and their political incentives, but he can’t play along with it, even to his own potential detriment, simply because it bruises his ego to do so.
In the meantime, Trump has found some lawyers to replace the ones who just quit en masse. He’s chosen a legal team that previously represented such luminaries as Roger Stone, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein.
If this, then maybe, just maybe, you’d get a few more Senators to convict. But it still wouldn’t be enough. It should be obvious now that there is no red lineTrump can conceivably cross that would result in any consequential Repub party rebuke of Trump.
Yes, Trump is a moron, but the two things he’s got in spades are a predatory instinct for seeing (or fabricating) other people’s weak spots and total shamelessness in going for them (which makes the fabricated ones “real”).
Trump knows he’ll be acquitted no matter what. That’s why he wants the election fraud out there. Then when he’s acquitted on ostensibly Constitutional grounds, he will with due haste construe it as TOTAL VENDICATION!! (sic in anticipation of the “tweet” he’ll send on whatever platform he’ll use) of his stolen election crap.
Trump will win because of this. The Republicans will win because they won’t have to say boo about what Trump did, plus they’ll harp on about all the wasted time and lack of unity-promoting (which they will then use as a nice excuse to 86 any pretense of “bipartisanship”). And the Dems will, once again, be absolutely correct on principles, but, once again, snag defeat from the jaws of victory.
I suspect McConnell saw this coming and has played it that way. He’s an amoral ass, but a much better politician than anyone the Dems have.
AKA Assholes R Us Legal Services.
(A nitpick: Castor didn’t represent Cosby, but was the DA who declined to prosecute him for some of the initial accusations.)
My preferred trial right now is:
- Call Trump to the stand
- Ask him if he won the election
- Ask him if he intended the “stop the steal” march to convince Congress to throw out the certified electoral votes
- Sit down.
In my fantasy world, that is all it takes. More specifically, if the trial takes weeks, folks will get bored and then Trump and the GOP will face lesser consequences.
It’s really pretty simple - he thought he won, he didn’t, he tried to overturn the legitimate results. That that ended up in violence is to some extent irrelevant - even a peaceful attempt is sedition(?). Not going to convince the 30% that are Trump crazies, but a quick forceful summation IMHO will have a much larger affect on the reachable folks.
If you need to go a couple of extra days to get stuff that can be passed on to federal and state prosecutors, I guess that would be OK.
Well yeah. That’s why the Dems should turn it into a trial of the Republicans for refusing to convict Mr. Storming-the-Capitol-is-must-see-TV.
A meme I just saw on Facebook:
“Charles Manson carved a swastika on his forehead and his lawyers didn’t quit.”